The 4th, Early Man, Peaches, Cosmic Wonder, Oakland's Saviours, Honeycut, The Spits, and shows to see this week.
You know, being in clubs all the time watching music is something only suckers complain about. But sometimes you get downright cranky (spoiled) seeing too many performances in a row and all you want to do is be camping on a lake near Nevada City with your new friend Buck and 70 of your soon to be close acquaintances, all of whom somehow seem to live or have lived in Nevada City. Which is exactly where I found myself on the 4th of July.

The guy driving the boat is Buck and he has a sweet job as a small town postmaster -- the importance of which is that this job gives him six weeks of vacation. He spends a good chunk of that time off in a remote part of Lake Spaulding, where he's built a super rad Never Never Land pirate summer camp. First off there's the view.

Then there's the floating tiki bar with AstroTurf carpeting.

And the itty bitty baby puppy dog.

And the ukulele serenades from random strangers.

Boat Party Rules (no little shits around camp).

During the day, people floated on air mattresses and canoes.

But at night, that place turned out a wild dance party. It was everyone's favorite DJ, the iPod, playing Ludacris, OutKast, Zeppelin, whateverthefuck. And because there was no one even remotely close to our campground, no one got arrested.

When you're in the woods, you don't have TV. It's like the olden days, where you have to make your own fun. Like when the menfolk try and kill the rattlesnake that gets a little too close to a tent. This can take a good 45 minutes and involves rocks and pick axes and it doesn't matter if the rattlesnake gets free in the end (or that it was only a baby).

But the sad thing about camping is that eventually everyone needs a real shower and a shitter that isn't surrounded by like a bizzilion flies. So it was back to the city the next week. I went to First Thursday and ran into Mr. Trippe.

And saw some cool shit on my walk from the Lower Haight back home

Later that night I went to the Early Man/3 Inches of Blood show at Slim's. I really like Early Man, even though they're the kind of band that makes people pull out the hilarious "false metal" tag every once in a while because they're on Matador Records. (Does that also mean there's "false indie rock"? Kids who pretend to have grown up on Pavement and Sonic Youth but who really only got into the genre when, like, We Are Scientists put out a record?) Anyway, Early Man is a two guitar, one drummer operation -- which makes frontman Mike Conte yell retorts like, "What? You think we need a bassist? I think you need a dick in your mouth." You tell 'em!

You've got to hit least one amphitheater show in the summer and do the whole shebang - tailgate the thing on the early side, spent $20 on a beer and a disgusting wet mess of a bean and cheese burrito, and be transported back to your youth. This summer I hit Nine Inch Nails (my uncool high school band of choice) with Bauhaus (my friend Darrick's uncool high school band of choice) and Peaches (she just happened to be on the bill).

The great thing about amphitheater shows is people don't pay all that money and drive all that way to stand around bored shittalking the bands all night and giving you the stink eye because you've somehow invaded their personal space. They dress up, they get fucking into it. And while anyone can drop $60 for a t-shirt, nipple tape can make for a more personalized show of fan support.

The ladies love Peaches.

I can kinda take her or leave her, as funny as that whole "Teaches of Peaches" record was when it first came out. Live, though, she's a lot more entertaining now that she has a full band (that includes the drummer from Hole, JD Samson from Le Tigre, and Radio Sloan from the Need). Peaches is a crasser Joan Jett all swaddled in leather and neon, and I'll admit she still made me laugh that night.

Sunday, while everyone else and their Italian grocer was watching the World Cup, I went to the symphony in Stern Grove. Sometimes you have to class your shit up a bit. Plus it was my friend (and great local artist) Rene Garcia's birthday (that's him with his wife Holly and baby Rene Valentino) Check out Rene's glittery eye candy at http://www.renegarciajr.com/ (although it's hard to tell just how huge a lot of his pieces are from a website. I commissioned the giant Mick Jagger portrait out of vinyl and it takes up most of one wall).

Last week I also hit the Cosmic Wonder openings first up the Cosmic Satellites show at Triple Base Gallery, where the vibe was most definitely one of pungent hippie. When we got there the room was jam packed around this little candlelit drum circle with photographer Mark Borthwick at the center jamming on bells and bongos and other tinkling noisemakers.

I ran into my friends Derek Fagerstrom and his wife Lauren Smith at the show. They just moved back to SF from NY and are opening an art gallery in Bernal Heights called The Curiosity Shoppe. Keep an eye out for it.

Betty again with Cosmic Wonder artist Hisham Bahroocha (left) - who used to be in Black Dice. Now he makes similar sounding ambient soundscapes as Soft Circle. I really dig his music he burned me a rough mix of what's going to become his debut and it's beautifully celestial, droning electronic passages with crazy bird sounds and bits of Eastern music. Next to him is Mark Borthwick again, who filmed the Cat Power DVD and has a folky act called Will Shine that performed at the big YBC Cosmic Wonder opening (as did Soft Circle).

Followed that up with yet another metal show. Which means I have too many photos of dudes with long hair obscuring their faces. I will say that Oakland's Saviours (pictured below) killed it that night. Really dynamic, heavy songs without any fancy effects making. Raw as a dog bite. The Sword, however, are one of those bands that I keep forgetting that don't really like. They played with Saviours and there just ain't nothing new or interesting about the Sword's take on stoner rock.

Thursday night the haircuts were significantly shorter for the backpacker hip hop show at Bottom of the Hill. This dude warmed up the crowd. He's a local guy who I believe is called Silent Army. He dressed like a member of Weezer but modeled his delivery after Eminem (which I appreciate because I hate that whiney nerd hop shit). He seemed a bit nervous (I don't think I've been to a hip hop show where the artist fast-forwards the beats to get to "a better song") but he still had all the right kind of energy. The only real cringe-inducing moment was when he rapped over Ice Cube's legendary "It Was a Good Day" with some emo line like "It was a good day didn't have to check my MySpace page."

I'm gonna go out on a limb though and say most of the young ladies in the house were there to see Bart Davenport's new band, though -- Honeycut.

They're a fun summertime funk act that lands somewhere between Jamie Lidell and Beck - but much more casual party vibe than the Velveeta occasionally sliced out by those bigger names. (Although again, some of the lyrics could use a little work. Do we really need another song about impeaching the president? Wasn't Neil Young's take on that subject punishment enough?) But Davenport is a charmer on stage - he's goofy, he throws his hands and legs all over the place, he makes you want to dance, he's got a keyboard player with some fancy footwork, and the band got the girls squealing with excitement.

All of which was small potatoes, though, compared to last weekend, when one of my favorite people in the universe, Kelly O., came to town. She's my girl from Seattle, and we've hosted some of the craziest punk-rock-in-the-basement Xmas parties I was lucky to have survived with only a fractured foot. She's also a great photographer, and writes a column for a paper I used to work for (and dearly miss) called the Stranger. (Her column is called Drunk of the Week ). She shoots a lot of crazy shit, though, including the "100 Balls" show that Noah randomly blogged about here a little while back.

We hit Aunt Charlie's in the Tenderloin because the cocktails there are potent and only $3.50 a pop (even less when the bartender forgets to charge you) and the crowd is usually really friendly. Fridays the bar hosts the Hot Boxxx Girls, a straight-outta-John-Waters dive bar drag show scene by some crazy looking queens. This is the emcee, the glamorous Gina LaDivina (the "$65,000 silicone wonder") with two fistfuls of dollar bills from prancing down the aisle a couple times.

No time for the finest yellow watermelon Turk Street had to offer...

We were heading to Annie's to see the Spits, one of my favorite punk bands. They're from Seattle. They always dress in costumes. And that night they were cavemen.

The Spits' repertoire is full of yer classic delinquent material - songs about skating and fucking with the cops and this shitty world and taking back the alley, all sung in a Ramones/Kids style chantalong that lifts the fists skyward every time.

We were right in front and I got smashed into the stage so many times my knees are now the color of eggplant. The Spits make people go apeshit.

But it was so worth it.

God bless the Spits

..and their fans

..and all the good times I've had with that Kelly O .(I'm still not sure how she took this photo of us but I know it was a good night)

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

SAN FRANCISCO --- The Headlands Center for the Arts is preparing for their largest fundraiser of the year set to go down on June 4th at SOMArts here in the city. Art auction, food, drinks, live music, etc and all for helping to support a great institution up in the Marin Headlands. ~details

ABOUT HEADLANDSHeadlands Center for the Arts provides an unparalleled environment for the creative process and the development of new work and ideas. Through a range of programs for artists and the public, we offer opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and exchange that build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society.

Just want to say congrats to Fecal Face's Rachel Ralph for graduating from SFAI with her masters in curatorial studies. Also want to congratulate Alex Ziv who also just got his MFA in painting. Also a high five to the talented Mario Ayala who also just graduated from SFAI as well! --- All super talented artists (thinkers), and we're excited to see what the future holds for them!

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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